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Showing posts from August, 2014

Geek Sublime

The daily beast magazine featured Vikram Chandra a writer who also wrote code for living. His recent novel Geek sublime depicts his obsession of coding. For reviews of the book, Take a look at this article below http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/29/vikram-chandra-is-a-novelist-who-s-obsessed-with-writing-computer-code.html What I find most interesting in this review is a quotation of Chandra about life of a novelist “Writers, like other kinds of artists, begin with assumptions of probable obscurity and relative poverty, so there’s less external pressure.  It has meanings to me because I'm also practicing this kind of life style; reduce much of my daily needs, eat less, etc so external forces wouldn't be my pressure. It seems that artists also face up with external pressure of daily life.

Digitalize everything

Recently I have chances to watch a real web system in real life. One of difficulties I face everyday is to understand the behavior of our systems, as well as its performance. To understand system's  behaviors, I have no way but digging into a myriad of lines of code. To understand system's performance, I need base numbers. Base numbers are indicators which show system's work loads. Is our system overload or under-load. Is it possible to run some more query than current work load. It's this moments that reminds me the important of having numbers. In other word, If you can't measure, you can't manage. I just expand my imagines to real life and realize that not just in computer do we need numbers. In real life, people also compare to each other on numbers. How much salary do you gain each month. How many people do your company possess. How many wives does a person have. Each indicator depicts a kind of level of success. And I begin to realize that in order to m

The history of Motorola

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/September-2014/What-Happened-to-Motorola/ A long article of the history of Motorola, a giant in mobile world for around a century. I didn't have time and energy to read the whole article and still wanted to come back to it later, so I post here for people who interest and for me later.

Incomprehensible

For several incomprehensible reasons, I was involved in a private group. People in this group are dreaming of their own business; they made the group's name "Business Plan Group". Not sure what people in this group are doing. To my understand, they might focus on writing their own business plan in order to apply into our country's market. I don't know the progress either. Someone presents randomly their own models and charts. The presentation is so fragmentaire that I cannot grasp the entire picture of what he is trying to do. Some people even ask me to join their obscure business. Of course, my answer is no. I just have interests in doing business myself, and I consider the mentality of running a business in a severe environment, the flow of cash is much important than just saying about what you're doing, or in short ideal. I just posted a video interviewing Elon Musk , one of my business hero, and asked for comments (course I think we can learn much a lot

Just one of my dream

Sometimes when coming across this kind of recruit on the internet I often wish I could have been able to write better in English (and of course in my mother tongue too). At first I may manage to write something but for a while I would neglect practicing and things stay the same. How can I learn to write as a native writer? How can I write not solely a clear sentence but also a sentence with humors?

Write and keep secret

I remember Dijkstra in one of his interviews said that he wrote his notes and kept them private because he realized that he would stir up disagreements due to his controversial point of views. He, therefore, kept all his notes in private. When people discover his notes, they found a treasure of computer science. Recently I was involved in several private group and gave out my thoughts. I realized that when my thought is not as similar as people's perception, all I got is resistance. Resistance comes in many forms. For people who show respect to me, they are in disagreement of my ideas but don't say anything. For people, who think they are more right than me, they negate my ideas and try to influence me by his ideas. Of course I don't think I'm absolutely right because to me what I talk is my perception of world. I'm ready to tell people how I see the world and welcome the way people see their world. But often, I receive a attitude of negation. I just think that I

Before a battle

My company's service will be down for maintenance up to 9 hours this Thursday (08/21). It's really an important maintenance. This time we will upgrade several parts of our network infrastructure from 1 GBps to 10 GBps. Our service will be faster. New network devices with more computing power will definitely enable dependable communication. I've  been preparing for the big maintenance for 3 months. I started this project with nearly zero understanding of our system and the way my company works. I had a vague image of our working system: a traditional stack with apache and mysql, and that's all I know. Since the time I began to dig down into our system, I have realized that it's more complex than I've thought. The configuration of each component is varied. The inter-component communication is abundant. I had no idea how to start. When the projects goes by, I'm quite diffident. Even now, only 2 days until, I'm still setting up our new Load Balancer. I&#